My Note-Taking Setup

I think that this is pretty cool and effective, if not necessarily efficient and elegant as it could be. I decided to detail it here to see if you guys could offer any tips or benefit from it at all.

I am about to enter college (Auburn University, Chemical Engineering) and I found my self looking for an effective way to keep track of my notes. This was always a problem for me in high school as I have an annoying tendency to misplace papers and generally be incredibly disorganized.

1) Take regular notes, in class, on paper.
2) Go home and use my scanner to import my notes into Evernote.

This is accomplished by using my scanner's (HP PhotoSmart) "Scan To" functionality. I had to tweak the setup in a few minor ways:

1) Change the default program that the scanner uses to handle image files in the device preferences.
2) Change Evernote's settings to automatically send the scanned notes to a local Notebook. This is because Evernote's free functionality is extremely limited in terms of filesize. An image is used in favor of a PDF because Evernote does not allow any files over 25MB, which I think is ridiculous, but whatever.

After everything is scanned in, Evernote pops up a window that allows you to rename the files and tag them. The filename is done by date, i.e., 090802 Calculus. This is so the notes can be sorted by date and by class within the main Evernote window. Next, I tag the notes with the specific topics that where covered: Derivation, Integration, Limits. This enhances the 'searchability' of the notes.

This method has a few major pitfalls. It takes a fair amount of time, even with the document feeder. Evernote's Handwriting and text recognition (which is a major selling point of the program) only works when you upload to Evernote's servers, which I avoided because of the price associated with the upgrade.

Any tips would be appreciated, and I hope this helps someone else.